The Jazz

So last night I went to a party to watch the 5th game of the Jazz series. (I can see Ed right now saying "So that's what happened!" *Shaking his fist* "Curse you Richey!!!") I tried to keep up with the sports banter, but I was pretty much out of my depth. I did manage to make a joke about Hakeem Olajuwon, since I was at least with it enough to remember that name, and that he had once played for the Rockets. I also made a history joke. Not a true joke mind you, but I referenced a poster that one of my brother-in-laws had posted on his blog, that I assume had show up at the San Fransisco protest of the Olympic Torch.

Anyway so I mentioned the text on this poster, and no one laughed. They all looked at me funny. The one guy tentatively said, "Didn't the Nazis have the olympics?" So not a huge success. I was about to whip out my World War 1 flying ace joke as my other history joke, but then the bishop walked in so I decided to shelve that one for awhile. Anyway back to The Jazz. If you hadn't heard it was pretty awful. The Rockets really spanked the Jazz. Of course the Jazz are still up 3-2 and the next game is at home, but if they play anything like that in the next two games it's over. Fortunately I have no intention of watching the next two games, so they should be okay.

My wife has her big concert on Friday and Saturday, so she has two rehearsals this week. One tonight and one yesterday, so since I wanted to go watch the game (or rather I felt sufficient social pressure to go watch the game, if it had been entirely up to me I would have stayed at work) I had the kids baby sit. My oldest was sick, so the second oldest was kind of on deck. They all did pretty well, though I did end up getting three calls on my cell phone during the course of the night. Which is of course another example of how kids have it pretty easy these days. When I was babysitting at that age we didn't have cell phones, you could call 911 (though I think even that wasn't around when I first started babysitting) or you could ignore it, but there wasn't anything for the in between issues...

The Cubs are doing well, for now...

Killing Time

Well I'm waiting for my wife to get back from the meeting she went to this morning for the "Future Problem Solvers" trip. The good news is that after some hinted at shenanigans yesterday where it looked like my daughter might have to enter a drawing in order to go it turns out that she definitely does get to go. The bad news is that it's probably going to cost even more than they originally estimated...

As far as the drawing, I don't have a problem with that per se. The problem arises that on Saturday the teacher told her she could go. And then to make sure of that I went and talked to the teacher and she confirmed that. So if you've already said yes, I get annoyed if you turn around and reverse the decision, particularly on something as big as this... Anyway I suppose that it will all work out.

To top it all off my daughter has been pretty sick since Saturday (high fever and lethargy) so the whole thing has been quite the roller coaster ride of emotion, illness, and expense...

And she's not even a teenager yet...

Opportunities and Problems

You know that old cliche, "Problems are only opportunities in work clothes"? Well I think the reverse is true: "Opportunities are only problems after a shower and some deodorant." On Saturday evening I went to the closing banquet of the future problem solving competition. In addition to the substandard food I expected, and the normal awards they also brought up every single kid who had participated (in groups by school) and presented them individually a certificate, so it was pretty long, and tedious. I can say this because my daughter agreed.

Anyway I was glad I was there to see her team take third place for their skit. Then later they ended up taking first place in the elementary school division. Which means they all get to go to Michigan. This seems like a great opportunity, but as you might have guessed from the quote above, there's a problem. It's going to cost about $1100/head and most of the money has to be raised by the end of the week. Meaning that even if I knew someone who might be willing to sponsor them, there's very little time available to arrange that sort of thing.

We've decided that if necessary we'll just pay for our daughter to go, but as you can imagine the timing is not what I would call "ideal". Anyway, as you can imagine I'm very excited for my daughter, and that's what's most important, or so I keep telling myself...

Everyone check your couches!

Carmina Burana

So a good friend of mine has season tickets to the symphony, but he had to move today, so last night was not a good time for him to go, so he gave his two tickets to me. They did a Kurt Weill symphony first, I forget which number (and it's not on their website). It was pretty good, but nothing to compare to Orff, which was the main event after intermission. I had originally intended to go with my wife, but our babysitter got sick so I took my oldest son (my oldest daughter had "Future Problem Solvers" all day today, so she needed to go to bed early). He behaved himself really well, and said he really enjoyed the pieces. As you might imagine he thought it was too long, two hours of classical music is beyond the attention span of most boys younger than about 18.

They ended up supertitling it, which, while useful and kind of interesting actually detracted, I feel, a little bit from the pure enjoyment of the music. Though it did allow the soloists to act out the words a little bit, which was funny. The Baritone in particular did a really good job. Perhaps the supertitling bugged me just because I was there with my nine year old son, and the subject matter of Carmina Burana is fairly racy, at least by the standards of orchestral classical music. In any event it was a good night, and I imagine that one day he'll use the fact that he saw Carmina Burana when he was 9 to burnish his cultured cred.

This assumes of course that at some point he'll want to seem cultured...

Miscellany

Well I have about 10 minutes before I have to leave to go to my son's birthday dinner so I'm just going to hit a few high points:

-I ended up suddenly deciding to go to GAMA in Vegas. It was pretty cool, though there were no spectacular products, except:

-The actual 4E books were there and I spent longer than I should have looking through them. I'm really excited. Even my friend who was fairly big 4E hater admitted by the end that he was probably going to buy all of the 4E stuff.

-On the shuttle to the airport last night my friend Wil Upchurch started doing a little dance, I said "The Dancing portion of the vacation is over." The other people on the bus thought that was the funniest thing ever, one person even went so far as to repeat it to her friend who hadn't quite caught it.

-My plane left at 11:52 pm, while waiting I decided it would be good to set my watch back which meant going from 11 to midnight, but of course the date didn't change so for awhile today I thought it might be Thursday.

-The plane didn't land until about 2:20 am, so that's why I'm tired enough to think it might be thursday.

-Overall I've very rarely been as positive about the future as I am now.

Can't rain all the time

This American Life

There's a lot of good entertainment out there. Way, way too much for anyone to sample even a thousandth of it. But if I had to recommend just one podcast it would be "This American Life". This last weeks program, as usual, had a couple of different segments, but the largest one was about this guy named Bob Nelson. So Bob is stuck in traffic one day when he hears a public service announcement about a Cryonics (I always get it wrong and say cryogenics) meeting. He thinks that's pretty cool, but that he probably won't be even allowed in, with all the scientists and other luminaries he expects to be there. This is back in the late 60s so the field was definitely in its infancy.

So he goes to the meeting and it's just a group of hobbiests so not only do they let him in, but they elect him president. Well initially they decided that absolutely no freezing would take place until they knew the science better. But before you know it people in the Cryonics Society start dying (the membership is heavily skewed towards people who are close to death anyway.) So the question is what do you do? Well the obvious thing is to mourn them and move on, but these are their friends their comrades in arms so to speak. And Bob doesn't feel like letting them down, despite the fact that they have no money. So he puts it to a vote, and all the members agree that these people should be frozen. But what they're really saying is that "Sure, we're fine if you freeze them, as long as we don't have to do anything." And of course it turns into a nightmare. As you can imagine trying to keep dead bodies frozen 24/7, with no money, in an industry with extremely immature technology, in Southern California, is ridiculously difficult.

I don't want to spoil the ending in case you want to listen to it (it's available for free download at the moment from the website I linked to above) but basically Bob ends up in a lot of trouble, as you might imagine. And while I think the narrator tried to end it in such a way that you felt sympathy for both sides, or possibly even where you end up blaming Bob. For me I totally identified with Bob. I mean I felt some sympathy for the other side, but from the moment things started going wrong I was on Bob's side. I mean basically the same thing that happened to Bob has happened to me a dozen times. (Obviously not on the same scale.) To give you just one quick story:

I was on my mission, and the sister missionaries and two of the four elders came up with this idea of doing a BBQ for the ward. his other elder and I thought it was a horrible idea, but it went forward anyway, once it was going forward it was obvious that the others weren't going to do anything about it, they were the idea people. So the choice was to let the whole thing collapse after it had already been announced, or for me and the other elder to step up and make sure it happened.

To make a long story short, they had only budgeted for the meat, nothing else. So me and the other elder paid for everything else out of our own pocket. We cooked all the meat, we cleaned up, and of course, you can see where I'm going if you've ever been in a situation like this, by the time it was our turn to eat all the meat was gone. Now, in this one instance, there weren't any complaints after the fact, but if there were who do you think they would have been directed at? The people who came up with the idea and then did nothing to execute it or the two people who hated the idea from the beginning, but worked their butts off to make sure it was pulled off? If you answered the former you still have a lot to learn about the way the world works.

Clinging to guns and religion for obvious reasons

Cultural Literacy

I was out to breakfast on Saturday with my business partners and it came out that neither of them had ever seen "It's a Wonderful Life". When I recommended that they should watch it they wanted to know why. I told them that they needed to watch it for the same reason I have to watch "Frisky Dingo". Stick with me here for a second.

In the past there were these seminal movies and books which entered the culture to such an extent that it's just expected that you know the plot, or the classic lines so that people can reference them and build up a sort of cultural short hand. So that when "The Simpsons" does its version of Citizen Kane they can do it all in 22 minutes and still have time for a guest appearance by the "Ramones". That's the point of watching a movie like "It's a Wonderful Life".

"Frisky Dingo" on the other hand represents kind of the extreme end of that trend. It seems that for my generation, media is so fragmented that rather than having these broad cultural touchstones, each clique adopts some show or internet meme as their own and uses that as a short hand for communication. So here in the office you have this bizarre short cartoon that appears on "Adult Swim" as the default media that ends up being short hand for all kinds of jokes, opinions and even culture.

Now I know that using lines from TV shows as short hand for communication has been around for a long time. I grew up saying "That's good stuff Maynard". Without ever knowing who Maynard G. Krebs was (of course I know now). So I don't think this is necessarily a new phenomenon. But, I think the groups are becoming smaller and smaller. To take an extreme example when Freud came up with his Oedipus Complex he could use that as a short hand because EVERYONE (or at least everyone who could read) had read Antigone, Oedipus the King, and Oedipus at Colonus. But now when I say, "Is it an ironic doom?" Virtually no one will understand what I'm saying, but the five guys at my office will laugh like crazy.

Welcome to You're "Doom!"

The Worst Nightmare I've Ever Had

So I had this horrible nightmare that woke me up this morning. I dreamed I was back in high school, and that I was at a big academic competition, like academic decathlon or something similar. There was a lot riding on it and just in the process of getting assembled I’d already gotten into a fight.

So I was looking for a place to sit, and I ended up sitting up near the front. They passed out a written test, which I was paging through while I sort of half-heartedly listened to the announcement of events. I did notice that there were some people who were in desks which had been turned around to face the rest of the crowd and that they were already furiously working on their tests. It was about the time that the announcer indicated that one of these people had just finished their test, when I started wondering why I already had a test, and so I looked up and realized to my horror that I was sitting in that front row which had been turned, and that I was supposed to have been taking the test all along.

So I started furiously working, but this was no mere multiple choice test, with four easy choices, there were questions with 8 choices, and fill in the blank questions, and on top of that the questions were really bizarre. I was in the middle of a question that took the form of a massive paragraph with twelve blanks I had to fill in and the whole thing was dialogue from the movie Bambie, when the terror finally awoke me.

I was busy writing "flower" in all the blanks when I woke up

Allergies?

I don't have any allergies that I'm aware of, but all day as I've sat at my desk trying to work I've had this horrible runny nose. In fact I was wiping my nose so much that it ended up getting dried out enough that I got a bloody nose. That's probably a once a year event for me, so that should give you an idea of how bad it is. Without any other symptoms, and it being a windy spring day, I'm wondering if I've suddenly developer allergies at 37... I hope not, though obviously of all the allergies I could have this is probably about as mild as they come.

I don't think I've mentioned this yet, but for part of next week I'm going to be in Vegas at the Game Trade Show. It's the premier trade show for the "Table Top Gaming" industry. I've been once before and it was pretty cool, and they're fortunately not allowed to sell anything in the convention hall, so there's much less danger that I'll blow a big wad of cash. Also I don't gamble so I'm not at risk there either. Should be pretty fun, and probably a bit more low key than the other conventions I've been to recently, though my flight back arrives at 2:30 in the morning, so that's going to screw up my schedule quite a bit (wonder who I'll get to pick me up?)

Other than that the big news is how incredible my wife has been about covering for me at home while I put in all these long hours. Today she put together a dresser and cleaned off the back patio (a really big job), plus a bunch of other stuff. Pretty amazing, I'm a lucky man.

The best revenge is living well...

Status Report

Well I'm feeling much better after going to bed at 8:00 last night. It did take me awhile to fall asleep, but it wasn't as bad as I feared. I would say that I was down for the count by 9:15 and drifting in and out before then. The best thing about it was that when I woke up for my nightly trip to the bathroom it was a 2:00 am rather than 6:00, which gave me plenty of time to fall back asleep. The light from outside still woke me up around 6:00 or 6:30, but after going to bed at 8:00 it wasn't as bad.

I've been planning to start exercising for awhile now. For quite a while my excuse was that I would start exercising once my old job finally stopped needing me. Well that happened this week, so with that out of the way I had to get serious. I was catching up on Penny Arcade last night and they had a link to this inspiration story of someone using Wii Fit for 7 weeks and getting some decent though not spectacular results. I had been thinking for awhile that perhaps there might be some fun way of using the Wii to lose some weight, so I decided right then to pre-order it. (I'm not sure how the testimonial dude got it early). I'll let you know how it goes. It was only $90 so Even if it's a complete failure I won't be out too much.

Always looking for the easy way out...

Tired (again)

You ever have one of those days where things seem to be pretty normal and then at some point you're so sleepy that it's all you can do just to sit up straight? Today was one of those days... I really should have taken a nap, but the wife and I went to the temple this morning. And from 5:30 on this evening I was going to be busy with the kids, so in this afternoon was really the only chance I had to get stuff down. I didn't really feel like I could miss an entire day, which I was pretty sure is what would happen if I took a nap.

Anyway, it's 8:00. The younger two kids are in bed, I think the older two can fend for themselves, so I think I'm going to hit the sack. Hopefully I'll be able to fall asleep, there's nothing worse than being really tired but unable to sleep.

Old and Frail

Blackberry Part Deux

Behind where I sit is a large window, with a fairly wide (10") window ledge. Right underneath the ledge is an outlet, so that is where I had plugged the charger for my blackberry. And then I rested the blackberry on the ledge. Well I turned to look at it and when I set it back down the cord got looped over the arm of my chair so when I turned back towards my computer it pulled the phone off the ledge and the lens that covers the screen cracked. Initially I was pretty mad at myself. It's annoying when you do something stupid like that, but it also shakes your confidence. What was particularly annoying is that they had a 14 day unconditional warranty and today was day 17... Anyway I called up the local T-mobile shop and they directed me to a repair shop that was only about five minutes away. So I jumped into my car and immediately drove over there.

Now you may be wondering if I knew whether they were open or if I called first or anything like that, and the answer is know. They were still open, though their repair guys are only there until 6:00 so I'm going to have to come back tomorrow (total cost $10, so it really wasn't that bad). So you may even be thinking it was a wasted drive, but I think that immediately driving there was possibly the one smart thing I did. I mean how often does something like that happen where you do something dumb, like waste an hour watching Saturday Night Live clips (I particularly like this one it's clean though very bizarre.) And then you compound the error by stewing over how dumb that was. I mean even if it's only for a minute or two you're still wasting time, and even worse you're beating up on yourself and in the process sapping whatever motivation you might still have.

So yeah, I think immediately acting, even if it isn't the optimal action is really the best way to recover from bone-headed mistakes. Perhaps this is already completely self-evident to everyone but me, but I know I could work on it.

However if you slap your head and say "Stupid" as an homage to the late Chris Farley, when you do something dumb, that's funny, and should be encouraged

My Blackberry

For over a week it's been on my to-do list to get my new blackberry (the old job is making me give back my old cell phone) all set up, with all my contacts and get it customized so that it could get my e-mail remotely. Because I've had so much to do I've been putting it off, but I finally got around to it tonight. I wasn't very far in (I had disabled the default e-mail and downloaded a custom g-mail app) when I decided I could go no further until I figured out how to change the background image. Long time readers of my blog maybe familiar with my background/desktop/wallpaper obsession. I'm not sure why I put so much stock in changing my background image. I think it's because it very quickly establishes right off the bat, that this is my computer. I've customized it to my tastes, and as a result it does what I need it to do.

While I feel somewhat guilty at the time I spent finding a suitable background image. I don't really feel guilty about the time I'm taking to get the blackberry to work the way I want it to. I hate to say it, but I use my cell phone so much that any time I spend now will be more than recouped later in ease of use. I mean I only have to save a minute a day (on average) and that's worth 12 hours of my time. And my guess is that the 1 minute a day average is very conservative. Anyway if anyone knows any really cool tricks for the blackberry, free games, ssh clients, how permenantly get rid of the pre-installed FaceBook icon (not just hide it). I'm all ears.

Next we'll talk about why my weird perfectionism is going to make me transfer all my contacts by hand...

Debate

When I was in High School I did debate, two-man policy. I was pretty good. My partner and I took 2nd place in the State Tournament and qualified for Nationals. There's a lot of stories in this area, but that's not the point of this post. It's to talk about my #1 daughter's fledgling debate career. First off when you've done debate, or more broadly argued in a structured environment you have a tendency to be annoyed with arguing in a more unstructured way, even though you still enjoy arguing otherwise you wouldn't have been in debate in the first place. This can be kind of frustrating. But it maybe even more frustrating when someone pretends to have implemented the structure of a good debate, but when you look closer it's only facade.

So obviously I was pretty excited when my daughter started doing debate. This actually started last year, and she was doing pretty good. But I quickly began to suspect that something was rotten in Denmark, if you will. Last year the topic was alternative energy, this year the topic is pollution. Now I'm not saying those aren't good topics. But because of the limitations of elementary school debate it ends up being more of an exercise in indoctrination than an exercise in rhetoric. For one at the elementary level you don't have the time or the experience to really do a policy debate. As in the affirmative taking a very specific policy stand ("The US government should spend 5 billion dollars blanketing the southwest with windmills") Instead you end up with more general "Alternative Energy is Good" or "Pollution is bad" positions as part of the affirmative plan.

Another limitation is that a student must choose to be always affirmative or always negative. In high school debate you trade off. Half the time you're the affirmative and half you're the negative. This more than anything else is the real benefit of formal debate. Being forced to defend both sides of an issue is an exercise I think every student should have to go through. Combine these two aspects of the way they've set up elementary debate and you've got a huge number of people who want to be affirmative, and you've put the negative side at a serious disadvantage. Guess which side my daughter ended up on? Oh yeah, negative.

Rather than having the advantage of picking apart a specific plan, they basically end up having to take the unenviable general position that pollution is good, or alternative energy sucks. And most of their arguments devolve into a quasi-libertarian "the government shouldn't do anything". Now that is a pretty strong position all by itself, but it still paints them into an unenviable corner, and leads to, I believe, a fundamental imbalance at the root of the entire set-up...

No I'm not living vicariously...

Bragging

Complaining about how bad things are is easy. Everyone does it. As Drew Carey said:


Oh, you hate your job? Why didn’t you say so? There is a support group for that. Its called EVERYBODY and they meet at the bar.

On the other hand boasting about how good things are is more difficult. People may get tired of whining and complaining, but they'll tolerate it for awhile. But flaunting your good fortunate generally provokes immediate hostility. Maybe I'm overstating things, but I don't anyone would dispute the truism that people will tolerate complaining for a lot longer than they tolerate boasting. And yes I know there's a third way where you neither boast nor complain, but that has it's own difficulties. I mean if you do that you have to actually be interesting...

Anyway in the midst of all my complaining I thought I would brag for awhile.

-I have an awesome wife. When I told people at my old job that I was quitting to start a business at least a half a dozen people came up and told me that they had always wanted to do that, but that their wives wouldn't let them. She's awesome. She's kept things going even though I'm working 10-14 hours a day, she keeps the family running smoothly. I couldn't do any of it without her.

-My kids are amazing. They're always excited to see me. They're amazingly understanding about my schedule. They're all great to talk to, I love hanging out with them. They're smart inquisitive and really, really cute.

-I may not be making much money right now, but I'm in control of my destiny. I get to succeed or fail on my own.

-I get to be part of creating something completely new. I get to be part of turning nothing into something, of bringing into existence by sheer force of will.

-I'm involved in all the decisions, from the culture we want to create, to how the business spends money, and even what features we have.

So yeah it's scary and yeah it could collapse in a horrible and dramatic fashion, but I'll always have the fact that I put my ass on the line and I went out there and did it. And of course as I already mentioned that was only possible because of an immensely patient long-suffering wife, and some really amazing kids.

As I mentioned people really don't like it when you boast, but if you thought this post was over the top, then you'd better hold your tongue the next time I complain.

That's it! You people have stood in my way long enough. I'm going to clown college!

Dearth of Comments

I had hoped that by blogging more regularly I might get my comment count back up. There was a time when I got at least one comment on every post I made, but things have been pretty slow recently. I think the only one who comments regularly anymore is Ed, and I'm pretty sure that's just his tactic for avoiding the big final papers he has to write in order to graduate with his Masters of Divinity. I think the problem is that for a long time I was the only one in my family who blogged, and not only that, but it was novel. Now I have two sisters, two sisters-in-law, two brothers-in-law and uncounted more distant relatives (cousins, etc.) who are all blogging. And they write about cute stuff like their precocious kids, and post pictures of the precocious things they're doing (which mostly seem to involve applying markers to surfaces other than paper).

I guess I need to start pandering. No more posts about how tough it is to do a startup. No more complaints about lack of sleep, or children vomiting. No more posts about role-playing games, video games, any thing with the letters "g", "a", "m" and "e". Which is... difficult. Okay, they all have to be in the same word... But still never again!!! From this time forward it's just cute pictures of kittens!



Wow! I didn't realize how soul destroying it would be to post even one of those pictures... It's like I need some gum to get the bad taste out of my mouth. I can't do it... I can't sink to that level... I guess I'll just have to be content to blog along quietly without any feedback, or any outward clues as to whether anyone is even reading my blog.

A lone voice crying in the wilderness

My Last Day (No really, this time I'm serious)

Well it was just shy of nine months ago that I told my bosses that I was going to quit and start my own business. And after going through every form of employment known to man (including highly-paid contractor, which I think was my favorite) I think today was finally my last day. Mostly I say this because I turned in my laptop, re-routed my e-mail address, and sent out a farewell e-mail. It wasn't quite a clean break, I still have my phone, because I forgot the charger, they don't have anyone that's waiting for it, and my permanent phone number hadn't yet switched but I've basically handed over all of the duties to the new guy. The on-call number now points at his phone. The odd question could come up, (in fact I hope it does) and I still have to eventually turn in my phone, but I think this is about a solid a dividing line as I'm likely to see.

I also donated platelets. Everytime it comes time to donate I feel like I'm just way too busy to spare the time, but I've really tried to do it regardless. I wouldn't characterize it as some selfless act, I mean I do get to watch a movie (3:10 to Yuma -- Capsule Review: Pretty Unrealistic even for an action movie, but I really, really liked the characters). It's more something that I want to do, for all sorts of reasons, and that I know won't get done unless I pretty much make it a higher priority that just about anything else (I did once reschedule because we were meeting with some investors, but that's about the only thing that will bump it.)

Anyway I'm not sure how I feel about the last day thing. There is a certain amount of fear, but I'm already experiencing what can only be characterized as "terror" so I barely even notice a difference. There's the feeling of a little bit of extra freedom, but I already got most of the bang from that already. I guess my biggest emotion is nostalgia. Nine years is a big chunk of time, and as much as I wanted out, most of the time was pretty good. It's kind of like leaving home and family and I have a really strong desire to make them all proud.

It was the best of times it was the worst of times

Sunday's

I was thinking of blogging yesterday, but my life is so consumed with the minutia and stress of the new company that I couldn't think of anything to write about except perhaps how tired I was (though for those in my reading audience to whom this makes sense General Conference was very good). In fact since I was in LA the Sunday before yesterday was kind of my first day off in over two weeks. I had grand visions of maybe playing a video game or doing something else that was fun, but when the day finally came nothing really seemed very exciting (except napping and the aforementioned GC kind of put a kink into that plan). I took a shot at "Sins of a Solar Empire" and "Jade Empire" I paged through the "Rise of the Runelords" adventure path. I watched a little "Return of the King" with my son, but nothing really spoke to me. I was kind of hoping for a "this is what I've been missing, now my batteries are recharged" experience, but it didn't happen.

I've had the "King of Kong" out as my Netflix movie for longer than I care to admit. Saturday night when I was here in the office at 9:00 I figured that I could take something of a break and watch it while I cleaned out my e-mail. It was really good. I'm not sure if you would get everything out of it if you weren't familiar with the "golden age" arcade games, but I would still highly recommend it even then. I think it's a story that a lot of people can identify with.

Anyway I'm over my alloted time to spend on this, so I better end.

Coffee Break's over. Back on your heads!

Ice

I really wanted to make sure to blog today, since I've been such a slacker over the last week and a half. But I wasn't sure what to write about. I mean I could have written about how it sucks to work on Saturday. Or I could have written the 4,789th post about how busy I am. Or I could have written about watching General Conference on my computer, but none of those had the right zing I was looking for. So I wandered over to Fark.com to see what kind of stories were making the rounds there. Within 60 seconds I had found this story about someone aborting their solo trip to the north pole because of ice.

Beyond the obvious humor of the north pole trip that was stopped by ice, the column has generated what may be described as the predictable battle between the two sides of the global warming debate. If you read the actual article it's obvious that he was prepared for some ice, but apparently there was an "appalling" amount of ice, worse than he ever imagined. He also claims to have been preparing for seven years. So of course beyond the references to blindly believing Al Gore I'm curious about why there was so much ice. For one thing before we get into any discussion of global warming, is the first of April really the optimal time to take a trip to the North Pole? I know that this was a particularly bad winter (I just talked to a guy from Canada who said that they had received a truly staggering amount of snow. So if the guy had just corrected for the unusually harsh winter and left in say June would he have been okay?

Also as usual when I hear about these epic feats of endurance I'm pretty jealous, but then I realize that I'm also in the middle of doing something extremely epic myself. And then I'm not quite as jealous. Speaking of that I read this great blog entry from Marc Andresson (founder of Netscape) that was a guide to doing a start-up. You may not want to read the whole thing, but you should definitely scroll down and view the closing metaphor because it's dead on.

Still in the belly of the giant space worm

Travelling

Well I was in LA from Thursday until LATE (the plan touched down at 11:57 pm) Sunday. It was a internet marketing conference and frankly I expected it to consist of mostly semi-reformed spammers talking about gaming one system or another in order to get gullible masses to sign-up for thinly disguised pyramid schemes. Okay so I had kind of a bad attitude, though to be fair if they were going to teach me their quasi-legal tactics I might hear them out at least, you know just to be fair. In any case I was very impressed by the people they had as speakers. As the keynote for the first day they had the CEO of Zappos.com. His talk was really amazing. I signed some horrible NDA, so I'm not even sure what I can say, but that was worth the price of admission right there.

Part of the problem with a convention/conference like that is that you spend all day every day listening to ideas, writing down good ones and in all cases thinking of how what's being said might apply to your business. By the end I was sick of brainstorming ideas for the business, I just wanted to shut of my processor for awhile if you know what I mean. Of course now that I'm back I have all the stuff that was piled up before I left plus all the ideas and action items I ended up getting at the convention. I haven't been all that effective today because just trying to decide where to start is overwhelming.

That's really the big problem with traveling, or at least the aspect of it that I have yet to figure out how to overcome. Traveling really throws of my routine. I can be cruising along staying on top of things, powering through a big chunk of my list every day and then I have to travel, and suddenly I don't have the same tools, my schedule is all messed up, I'm collecting all kinds of stuff with no time to process it and when I get back from even a short trip it takes me at least a day or two, if not more just to get back in the groove. This is obviously something I need to work on. Anyway I thought I'd take a second and blog since it's been so long. I know it's not that exciting, but as they say you get what you pay for.

Every so often I pause for a second to check out the view, it's actually pretty good I just don't get to enjoy it